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Drying Your Eyeballs on a Towel and Becoming a Fan of Fiddlehead Ferns

On one of the days in which I accidentally dried my eyeball with a towel after my shower the pain started a thought process about hotel towels and hotel rooms that led to a sudden urge to create a poem. Energy levels being high I also decided it HAD to be a palindrome.

I first became excited by the form when I read Caroline Bird's 'Drawn Onward'. If you love poetry you have probably already read it, but if for any reason you haven't then I highly recommend you make it one of the next poems you read.

I was ridiculously pleased with myself when I created a short palindromic poem about fiddlehead ferns in summer 2020 and sort of thought it would be the only one I wrote so imagine how pleased I was to create a second! I hope it will find a home of its own, but in the meantime here's my 'fiddlehead ferns' kindly homed by 192 Poets Directory:

 

We Few Deified We Few

 

Wanting us to feast differently   

I filled a basket with fiddlehead ferns

right to the brim for you:

ostrich fern, lady fern, bracken.

Tossing their bitterness

with garlic and rock salt.

 

Look, I tell you, I have foraged

this taste for you.

 

I let lemon zest fall on

those curled caterpillars

amongst the charred green-brown leaves.

 

We do not mention

that vague muddiness on our tongues.

We do not mention,

amongst the charred green-brown leaves,

those curled caterpillars.

 

I let lemon zest fall on

this taste for you.

 

Look, I tell you, I have foraged.

 

With garlic and rock salt

tossing their bitterness;

ostrich fern, lady fern, bracken.

 

Right to the brim for you

I filled a basket with fiddlehead ferns;

wanting us to feast differently.

 

Video reading of We Few Deified We Few

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